Venice, celestial city of gold and splendour, Queen of the Adriatic, hides a dark secret. The story of her birth on 25 March in the year 421, as a Christian city favoured by Saint Mark, a free city-state immaculately conceived
The Spare Room: a sketch
I hardly knew Madeleine. Perhaps that was part of the problem. The other part was that she was particularly house-proud. Shiny surfaces, absence of clutter and not a speck of dust lurking in the crevices of skirting boards were, to
How the Brothers Grimm Came to Write Fairy Tales
This is the tale of how Wilhelm and his brother Jacob came to write the fairy tales that fed our childish imaginations and that of earlier generations – their first published collection appeared in 1812: Children’ and Household Tales (Kinder-und Hausmärchen).
Love Letters
Love Letters: a gentle Christmas story “No, Harold, you can’t have ‘PO’.” “Why can’t I? It’s an abbreviation.” Harold’s truculence is purely theatrical, designed to arouse his audience, an objective he usually achieves. “It’s not in the Oxford and, well,
Three Little Stories
I love writing flash fiction, as I’ve said elsewhere on several occasions. These three tiny flash stories were entered a while ago in a local competition for stories of exactly 100 words (excluding the title). An exact word count is